WHAT'S UP, DOC?

Round here we run a kind of ad hoc Doc Holliday Fan Club, and thus, when HCB sent over this news flash, I had to pause in my weekend labors to make it clear that any and every movie industry troll associated with any piece-of-shit Doc Holliday movie in 2010 will be under some seriously lethal shot-in-the-head-execution-style fatwa, okay?

"Paramount Pictures has picked up a spec script titled The Further Adventures of Doc Holliday, which they hope to turn into a summer tentpole, according to Variety. The spec was written by Chad St. John, who does not currently have any titles, but his name has been attached to Warner Bros. remake of the Sean Connery film Outland and his script The Days Before ranked as the 10th best unproduced screenplay on this year's Black List. While I would be ecstatic to see a genre so important to the history of film return, I'm not happy that it may come as the result of a Lorenzo di Bonaventura production. The whole thing reeks of Wild Wild West and that's a vomit-worthy smell. And while westerns may only come every now and then these days, the best possible Doc Holliday was already done by in Tombstone, and there is no way to top that.” (Not to mention Kirk Douglas, Dennis Quaid, Stacey Keach, and Victor Mature.) Click here for more.

The secret word is Warned

Cody Jarrett says. “That’s right. Warned.”

GRATUITOUS BARDOT

WHO NEEDS THE EGG? (A temporary reduction in service?)

Doc40 may prove a bit sparse this weekend. I have a major project to finish, plus the Yuletide disconnects are starting to kick in. Regular readers may recall that, back in April, I participated in something called Hawkfest at the Hollywood Knitting Factory. (Now closed as a sign of the times.) There’s now a clip up on YouTube with the usual dire camcorder sound. I’m not quite sure what I’m doing, except it was around 1.30 am, everything was running a couple of hours late which had caused me to consume more Jack Daniels than I had originally intended. This in turn, made getting Sonic Attack under way resemble herding cats, but at least I was standing, and had to good sense to both abandon the script, and exit the stage before the lady in white started skipping about. Click here if you want to relive the confusion.

The secret word is Labor

ALASKA FALLS INTO SEA

Klondike Barbie salutes the receding Alaskan coastline. “Isn’t Russia getting further away, by golly?”
(Image lifted from Dangerous Minds.)

A study out of the University of Colorado at Boulder shows that a substantial piece of the northern Alaska coastline is eroding at an astonishing rate of 45 feet a year thanks to three major threats - less ice, more waves, and warmer water. In other words, climate change is eating away at Alaska, and fast.

"The conditions have led to the steady retreat of 30 to 45 feet a year of the 12-foot-high bluffs -- frozen blocks of silt and peat containing 50 to 80 percent ice -- which are toppled into the Beaufort Sea during the summer months by a combination of large waves pounding the shoreline and warm seawater melting the base of the bluffs, said CU-Boulder Associate Professor Robert Anderson, a co-author on the study. Once the blocks have fallen, the coastal seawater melts them in a matter of days, sweeping the silty material out to sea." (Click here for the whole story and a time lapse video.)

Meanwhile UN climate negotiations become more and more chaotic…

COPENHAGEN - Fed up with the lack of progress in the climate negotiations, campaigners marched on the Bella Centre. NGOs at the negotiations staged a walkout to connect with civil society outside, but police violently broke up this ‘people's assembly' and arrested the ringleaders. (Click here for more)

The secret word is Moose

Click -- Gotcha!

CURIOUSER AND CURIOUSER

Important news comes from the world of Victorian literature.

"What would Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland be without the Cheshire Cat, the trial, the Duchess's baby or the Mad Hatter's tea party? Look at the original story that the author told Alice Liddell and her two sisters one day during a boat trip near Oxford, though, and you'll find that these famous characters and scenes are missing from the text. As I embarked on my DPhil investigating Victorian literature, I wanted to know what inspired these later additions. The critical literature focused mainly on Freudian interpretations of the book as a wild descent into the dark world of the subconscious. There was no detailed analysis of the added scenes, but from the mass of literary papers, one stood out: in 1984 Helema Pycior of the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee had linked the trial of the Knave of Hearts with a Victorian book on algebra. Given the author's day job, it was somewhat surprising to find few other reviews of his work from a mathematical perspective. Carroll was a pseudonym: his real name was Charles Dodgson, and he was a mathematician at Christ Church College, Oxford." A virus problem seems to have occured on the link. See Comments.

THE FROZDICK FAMILY

The Frozdick Search Engine was never able to outperform Google.

AND LET US NOT FORGET…

John Dillinger died for our sins.

SPACE OPERA

Protect those scantily clad minxes!
(Thank you, Valerie)

350

I have no desire to hear what a woman as stupid as Sarah Palin has to say about the environment, but my TV thinks I do. The smoke is blowing so hard on both the environment and US health care that you can’t see the woods for the bears. The induced confusion over the UN climate negotiations is absolute in the msm. If you really want to know what the fuck is going on inside the Bella Centre in Copenhagen you have to go and look for it. This seems to be a reasonable, short-attention-span breakdown of the real numbers involved and how the big countries will fuck the little countries while Corpoate Global (and China) will fuck everyone. I figure between them and Monsanto we’re probably doomed. (But don’t take my word for, I’m not having an optimistic day. You shoulda caught me yesterday, when I still thought we had a prayer.)

“The number to know is 350. It's what scientists have been saying for two years is the maximum amount of carbon dioxide we can safely have in the atmosphere, measured in parts per million. Those scientists have been joined by an unprecedented outpouring from civil society: in late October, activists put on what CNN called "the most widespread day of political action in the planet's history," with 5,200 demonstrations in 181 countries, all rallying around that number. Three thousand vigils last weekend across the planet spelled out the number in candles. Thousands of churches rang their bells 350 times on Sunday, and yesterday the World Parliament of Religions, meeting in Melbourne and representing the "largest interreligious gathering on earth" sent an emergency 350 declaration here to Copenhagen.
When they hit the button last night, the program showed that by 2100 the world's CO2 concentrations (currently 390) would be – drumroll please – 770. That is, we would live in hell, or at least a place with a similar temperature.” (Click here for the whole thing.)

The secret word is Finite

I was never a big consumer of Oreos. I needed more of a chocolate jolt. Let’s talk Three Musketeers. In the world of sweeties, I’m really quite a grown-up. But when you first become a drunk, you tend to give up candy. Unless you count the Brandy Alexander. Here’s more from Brad Reed on AlterNet.

“Typical frosting is made mostly from butter, milk, sugar and vanilla extract. No one will ever accuse it of being good for you, but at least you're eating fairly natural fats. Oreo stuffing, on the other hand, is basically sugar-flavored Crisco. Seriously, that’s what you’re consuming when you eat an Oreo. Oreos' death filling is so bad it even inspired an ill-fated lawsuit in California a few years back that tried to stop the sale of Oreos to children. While the suit was eventually dropped, it did introduce trans fats to the public consciousness and helped spearhead the campaign to make food companies indicate on their labels whether their products contained any trans fats, so it wasn’t a total waste. That said, I think the best way to stop people from eating Oreos wouldn’t be to ban them outright but to force Kraft to rebrand them to reflect their actual ingredients. So let’s say you mandate that Kraft label its cookies "Criscoroes" and have the package depict a kid gorging himself in a tub of vegetable shortening. Yum!"

AND TALKING OF FOOD, HERE’S A SHOT OF CLASSIC GAHAN WILSON

Who are these women and who is the guy bowing?

SPAM, IT SEEMS, IS NOT GOOD FOR YOU

Do you remember the scene in 1984 when Winston Smith’s neighbour declares the nameless pink stuff that hardly pretends to be meat and is served with the slop in the Victory Canteen to be “double plusgood”? It’s not an easy admission that I feel much the same way about Spam. Spam is double plusgood. I confess it. I like Spam. Vikings sing about it. Probably an aberrant result of being raised in the ruins of Europe when dead Messerschmitts still rusted in the fields. For many years, my mother preserved a weird World War II cookbook called something like “Meals To Beat Hitler.” Sometimes I suspected she wrote it. It contained many Spam driven recipes. I’m actually happy to eat Spam cold, diced and with ketchup, but if cooking is involved, my favorite is the Spam fritter, a thick slice of Spam deep fried in batter. I have never been under any illusion, however, that Spam might actually be healthy. File along with cigarettes under deviant lethal pleasure. Brad Reed’s note on AlterNet was certainly no surprise….

“Spam was really a major miracle of food science, as it solved a mystery that humanity had been trying for centuries to figure out: namely, how to make meat-flavored Jell-O. Developed in the 1930s, Spam is derived primarily from pork shoulder meat (seriously) and combined with water, sugar, sodium nitrate (of course) and copious amounts of salt. The result is a meat-like goo that derives 80 percent of its calories from fat and that delivers a whopping 790 mg of sodium per two-ounce serving. Spam first hit the big-time during World War II when its highly preserved state made it the ideal food to feed to our protein-needy soldiers fighting over in Europe. Now there's a fine tribute to our fighting boys! Thanks for risking your butts against the Nazis, fellas, now here’s a mound of pork slime! When you think about it, it’s remarkable that more of our troops didn’t defect to the German army, which assuredly would have offered them generous helpings of bratwurst, knockwurst and schweineschnitzel in exchange for changing sides. The fact that Americans bravely suffered through Spam prior to fighting the Battle of the Bulge adds yet another heroic chapter to the Greatest Generation’s legacy.”

The secret word is Bypass

SPAM SASHIMI?

SOMEWHERE OVER GRAVITY’S RAINBOW

“When did you last watch a cool Thomas Pynchon promo-video?”

Or have I run this before? It’s one of those winter sunset timewarps. Click here anyway.

REINDEER GAMES

Click here for something somewhat disturbing with cartoon reindeer.
Click here for something somewhat disturbing with yelling and violence and maybe bagpipes..
Click here for the Doc40 solstice offer.

SPACE OPERA

SUNDAY WITH CHUCK

Late last night HCB and I were exchanging emails (as in our wont.) The topic in this instance was Chuck Berry. H was concerned with inaccuracies in lyric transcripts, and I couldn’t help but recall how, when I interviewed the man for the NME in the mid 1970s, he came off like a slick, greasy, obnoxious conman with something close to contempt for his own work. (And don’t even mention the stories of his sex life.) But, while seeming wholly reprehensible, he did write all those songs. All those incredible songs. Was Chuck idiot savant of 20th century poetry? Check “No Money Down” reproduced below – a perfect, custom-paint vignette of the USA, like some hipster Norman Rockwell – preserving the days when the transaction between capital and labor at least kinda worked, when the UAW had plenty of juice and capitalism seemed to be creating a consumer version of the workers' paradise. Of course, we were burning natural resources like there was no tomorrow – and here in tomorrow we’re going to have to pay the price – but ol’ Chuck could make it all so seductive.

"Well Mister I want a yellow convertible

Four door de Ville

With a continental spare

And wire chrome wheels
I want power steering

And power brakes

I want a powerful motor

With jet off take

I want air conditioning

I want automatic heat

I want a full Murphy bed

In my back seat

I want short wave radio

I want TV and a phone

You know I got to talk to my baby

When I’m riding alone

I want ten dollar deductible

I want twenty dollar notes

I want thirty-five in liability

(That's all she wrote)

I got me a car

And I'm going to drive it down that road

And I won't have to worry

Bout driving that broken down old ragged Ford"

Click here for Chuck doing it live. And click here for a quality Chuck Berry fan site.

The secret word is Jitney

AY CARAMBA! (Part 2)

Yesterday we talked about how drug money has taken over the Mexican economy. Now our buddy Bernard sends this story about how it may have saved the banks…

“Drugs money worth billions of dollars kept the financial system afloat at the height of the global crisis, the United Nations' drugs and crime tsar has told the Observer.
Antonio Maria Costa, head of the UN Office on Drugs and Crime, said he has seen evidence that the proceeds of organised crime were "the only liquid investment capital" available to some banks on the brink of collapse last year. He said that a majority of the $352bn (£216bn) of drugs profits was absorbed into the economic system as a result.
This will raise questions about crime's influence on the economic system at times of crisis. It will also prompt further examination of the banking sector as world leaders, including Barack Obama and Gordon Brown, call for new International Monetary Fund regulations. Speaking from his office in Vienna, Costa said evidence that illegal money was being absorbed into the financial system was first drawn to his attention by intelligence agencies and prosecutors around 18 months ago.” (Click here for more)

“Have you noticed whenever the narcs seize drug money they arrange it all neat and photogenic, and garnish it with guns?”

(Now scroll back to last Wednesday for the Doc40 Solstice special offer.)